Failure to change, recipe for company failure –NIM President

The President and Chairman in Council, Nigeria Institute of Management, Prof. Olukunle Iyanda, says that organisations and companies that fail to adopt change in policies and structures are doomed to failure.

He stated this at the NIM colloquium on ‘Structure and Organisational Performance’ in Lagos.

“As a management scholar has observed, change, rather than stability, is the norm in contemporary organisations. Any organisation that does not change while its environment and characteristics are changing is doomed to failure and extinction,” Iyanda said.

He added that such factors as increasing population with improved demographic profile, increasing political awareness and sophistication, technological developments in communications and travel, etc., change the perception of people as it regards their relationships with their government.

“People demand that government responds to their yearnings and aspirations, that the locus of authority be closer to them such that it could understand and define its responsibilities in the context of the local environment and respond to them faster. These are the realities of the times,” he stated.

The NIM president said there was a cycle in the lives of nations, noting, “One nation in a different stage of the life cycle cannot be governed as another in a different stage.

“As such, the structure of governance in one country cannot be copied or replicated in another unless they share similar demographic attributes.”

He added, “The examples of many countries that have, in recent times, recorded dramatic changes for the better underlines the indispensability of change and restructuring, and indeed, re-engineering to unity, economic development and harmony among the citizenry.

“For example, Turkey, the ‘sick man of Europe’, was turned around from a medieval country to a modern economic and political power in Europe by Mustafa Kemal (the Attarturk) through an adept restructuring of all the institutions of the state.

“Lee Kuan Yew, through appropriate and adroit management skills, transformed Singapore, a dot on the Malaysian Peninsula, from a third world country to a first world country within a generation.

“China, after Mao Tse-Tung’s cultural revolution, was described as an ‘arrested civilisation’. It took the deft economic restructuring of Deng Hsiao-Ping to give the sleeping dragon the nimble agility to overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy.”

Iyanda said the examples showed that appropriately structuring and managing an organisation could affect its performance.

“It is our hope that this colloquium will provide guidelines to govern the changes that may be needed in our governance structure so as to keep the country united, while recognising its diversity and size as advantages rather than disadvantages for growth and development.”

An independent scholar, Prof. Ladipo Adamolekun, called for a change in revenue sharing arrangements in the country.

“The revenue sharing arrangements inherited by the military in 1966 has been distorted to the point that the revenue allocation formula inherited by the civilian government assigned the largest share of 52.68 per cent to the Federal Government, with only 26.72 per cent and 20.6 per cent to state and local governments, respectively,” he said.

He added, “The skewed revenue allocation formula has remained unchanged because the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission that has responsibility to review it from time to time has been ineffective.”

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